The Leonid night fell on the city softly, as if someone had scattered silver sugar over the rooftops. The buildings of the Copernicus High School looked older than usual at this hour - the brick darkened after the rain, and the clock tower towered over the courtyard like a sentinel betraying nothing. Roman numerals peeked from the dial, and the second hand trembled nervously, like a finger that can't resist tapping on the tabletop. - 'If it wasn't for you, I'd be under the blanket by now,' Marcel muttered, adjusting his hood. - 'But since you insist on climbing the tower in the middle of the night, I'm not going to miss the chance to take epic photos. Nina smiled crookedly and poked her head up. The sky was clear and icy. A rain of meteorites pierced the darkness in thin dashes, too fast to be caught in her hands. A brass key - heavy, angular, resembling the number four - was warm in her jacket pocket. The last thing she'd received from her grandmother, a clockmaker who could bring almost any mechanism to life and spoke of time as if it were a malleable material rather than a line. "Not everything is measured in seconds". - repeated the grandmother. - "Time hears. And it remembers." The door to the tower, closed for years, had no handle from the inside. Nina slid the key into a hole that looked blind. The lock first protested, groaned sadly, and then gave way with a click that carried across the courtyard like the short laughter of someone unwilling to be caught. - Is this illegal? - Marcel asked, but his voice betrayed more excitement than concern. - Rather forgotten,' she replied. - The school observatory closed down before we moved here. The library still hangs notices about the astronomy club, but it's all done in the physics room. The tower... was something else. They went inside. The air smelled of machine oil, dust and old leather. The metal staircase piled up steeply, creaking restlessly under their boots. The darkness was thick and soft as felt. A narrow beam oozed from above - through a gap in the observatory's curtained canopy. Marcel flashed the torch from his phone and circled the cool wall, stopping the light on a board attached to the wall. - "School Observatory at the M. Copernicus High School. Founded 1908. guardian: W. Łęcki." - it read. - They used to have momentum. - My grandmother said she was here once, a long time ago,' said Nina. - She claimed that the clock and the dome were one device. It sounded like a fairy tale. - 'Everything sounds like a fairy tale until you check where the screw is,' muttered Marcel and smiled at his own thought. The upper platform revealed an interior that Nina had no right to remember, and yet, as soon as she set foot, she felt as if smells and sounds were forming familiar patterns. To the left stood a heavy table, indented as if designed for human elbows. In the middle - an astrolabe made of copper, its plates seemed to move a fraction of a degree with her breath. On the table lay a leather book, untitled, with a spine cracked like a dried-up river. Next to it - a toolbox in which screwdrivers, compasses and old pencils smoothed like pebbles lived. Nina put her hand on the cover. It was cool and springy, as if there was no paper under her fingers but something that could deflect pressure. The brass corner flashed softly with a golden micro-inscription: "Exemplar of the Night Collection". Marcel whistled quietly, looking up to where Leonids danced through the narrow slit of the dome. - 'Wait,' he said, as Nina began to lift the cover. - 'Maybe it's the school registers. Or... You know, the forbidden catalogue. - If that's the case, we're already in,' she replied, but spoke softly. The air above the table was otherwise thick. From behind the face of the clock, which occupied the entire north wall, came a quiet, mechanical tinkling, like a flock of dashes that don't know where they are supposed to lie. The second hand on the dial rushed by at an even pace, like an arrow held by a trembling hand. Inside the book, the finger-turned pages rustled like raked leaves. Instead of even columns of text, the first pages were filled with diagrams and drawings: sky maps with handwritten annotations, gear diagrams, sketches of the dome. On one page appeared the inscription 'Hearing of Time - Chapter I', crossed out, and above it corrected: "Hearing". Below that, different versions of the same sentence, as if the author could not decide which way to go: "When you call him by name, he slows down"; "Don't quicken his step until you hear"; "Don't shout. A whisper will do." - 'Strange,' whispered Marcel, peering over her shoulder. - 'Sounds like the notes of someone who took poetry seriously. Nina lifted her gaze. An exlibris was embossed on the inside cover, so precise that the letters seemed to shade in. "Library Under the Tower. Ownership: ..." Next was a space for a name. Empty. The skin here was paler, as if someone had stroked it repeatedly, unable to write anything. - 'Here,' she said, taking her thin pen out of her pocket. However, she did not slide it onto the paper, but embraced it with her fingers like a pen, as one would hold a promise. Circling her gaze between the dial and the book, she felt something guiding her - not straight ahead, but around. - When I say 'Nina', will it work? - she joked, half to herself. - 'If it does, I'll be in the wrong fairy tale,' snarled Marcel, but he lowered his voice. - "Nina!" - she repeated, slightly louder, as if checking the acoustics. Something clicked. The clock immediately behind them blinked a metallic shadow. The sky in the gaping dome, which had hitherto celebrated with its own display, suddenly hovered. One of the glittering streaks stopped in mid-fall, like a luminous hair suspended from an invisible hook. Marcel twitched and reflexively lifted the phone. The lens caught the frame, the copper arches of the astrolabe and that suspended dash. Marcel's hand holding the phone mumbled in slow motion. - Don't move,' he whispered. - Or move very quickly. I don't know. Nina looked at the pages. The letters twitched - they didn't fall down, they didn't stand up, they just lost their shape for a moment, like smiley faces in steam on glass. And then they lifted slightly and formed a new row of words that hadn't been there before: "Greetings, Nina of the House of Lumber. Your name bears the murmur of rain, and your blood knows the rhythm of fluctuation. Do not ask how I know this. You agreed when the clues swirled over your quilt." - What is that supposed to mean? - Marcel hissed. - "The family?" "Swirls?" Who wrote that? She didn't answer. The sounds were changing colour. A low, almost tender murmur emerged from the jittering of the mechanisms, as if the dial on the other side of the wall was breathing. The second hand slowed down so that you could see the end of it dropping slightly between the digits. Nina moved her hand away with the pen. The brass key in her pocket trembled. The warmth that had hitherto been the calm breath of metal was becoming a persistent pulsing - like a rhythm that tries to teach you to dance before you can say no. - OK, I admit it - Marcel looked around nervously - this is already .... thick. We can come back tomorrow with someone adult. With the physics teacher. With a caretaker. With anyone who has experience with.... z... - With pendulums and books that write to you? - finished Nina. - Do you think anyone would believe me that I'm the one with the key? That it was grandma... She broke off as the book moved under her hand. Slowly, like water finding a new channel. A thin drawing of a clock face, which had not been there before, drifted in the Ionic margin. From this drawing, from its drawn edge, a shadow poured out. It was not flat - it was like smoke. On the next page appeared a notation in small writing: "Not out loud. In a whisper. Say the question that must not be asked aloud". - You're joking - Marcel took a step back. - 'That sounds like an instruction, like a summons... like something you shouldn't try without a helmet and a fire extinguisher. Nina took a breath. There was a taste of metal on her tongue, as if she had swallowed half a sentence of brass. She leaned towards the book and whispered not what she had planned, but what had arranged itself: - Who called me under the clock? For a fraction of a moment, nothing happened, if you didn't count the throng of shivers that rolled down her back. Then the dial gave way so gently you could have sworn it was just a breeze. The mechanical tingling was concentrated at one point, just beyond the crack between XII and I. The hands vibrated and, although time still stood under the Leonids, there was a three-fold, all too human knocking in the tower. From the inside of the dial. Marcel let out the air he had been holding for too long. - Did you hear that? Nina nodded her head. Her name - short, simple - resounded suddenly in space, as if someone had put it together out of breath. It was no ordinary voice. More the memory of a voice. A voice that knows the rhythm of the pendulum. "Lumberjack." - said softly, in a way that only one person who was no longer there could. The skin on the nape of Nina's neck shivered. The key in her pocket warmed violently until she had to tighten her fingers on the material of her jacket. In the book, the letters formed another sentence, so fast she could barely keep up with her eyes: "Don't be afraid. You are in the right hour. Open." - 'Don't do it,' Marcel whispered, and there was something in his voice that she rarely experienced in him: pure request. - There must be some sense to this. Another sense. Maybe it's a test. Maybe someone from the astronomy club made a particularly strange joke. Nina approached the dial. The glass was hazy from the mechanism, like a window into an orchard holding one's breath. As she slowly pressed her hand against the number XII, the cold passed through her gloves with such precision that she could count the veins of her skin. - See? - Marcel took half a step closer, as if he wanted to be closer and further away at the same time. - Even if it's ... whatever, we don't have to go into it up to our ears anyway. - We're already in,' she replied, without turning her head. From the other side of the glass something moved like a shadow - not a shape, not yet, just a shift in air density. The minute hand, which had just stopped at exactly XII, twitched backwards as if someone had pulled it with an invisible thread. The lock squeaked. A breath of air gushed through the narrow gap that appeared at the edge of the dial, daring the coolness of metal and rain. - Step back! - Marcel reflexively grabbed Nina's elbow, but she could already feel something on the other side touching the glass opposite her hand. Not a hand, not immediately. First a line, like a lifeline on the inside of her hand - luminous, sweeping. Then the knocking again. A tone quieter this time, as if hesitating whether it had the right to enter. "You have come at last". - the whisper came so close that it seemed to be born under the skin. - "Time stands still. But not for us." The gap widened to the thickness of a knife. Something on the other side began to slide out - and just then the astrolabe on the table spun on its own, throwing up a network of glittering dots that hovered around them like a miniature firmament. Each point pulsed, responding in its own rhythm to something approaching from behind the dial. Nina tightened her fingers on the key in her pocket and did what she'd been dreading since she'd put it in the lock: she pressed on the glass. The dial gave way another millimetre. The whisper spoke her name again - this time not like a reminder, but like a summons. The hands vibrated at the same time, as if someone intended to reverse the course of the entire mechanism. Out of the gloom behind the glass, the outline of...